Top Gear Star Clarkson Ponders Parliament Run Against Miliband

Jeremy Clarkson, star of the BBC’s “Top Gear” show and a friend and neighbor of Prime Minister David Cameron, said he was thinking about running for Parliament against Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.

“I’m thinking I might stand in the next election as an independent for Doncaster North, which is where I’m from,” Clarkson said in a Sept. 14 comment on his Twitter feed. “Thoughts?”

The star, best known for his sarcastic reviews of cars, also has a newspaper column and has written a series of best-selling books. His politics are hostile to the Labour Party and the European Union.

Controversial comments include a 2011 suggestion that striking public-sector workers should be shot and a 2009 description of then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.”

Miliband has represented the Doncaster North seat in northern England since 2005. In the 2010 general election, he got 47.3 percent of the vote. The Conservative candidate, in second place, took 21 percent.

In his column in the Daily Telegraph today, London Mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative, urged Clarkson to stand instead against Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in the nearby constituency of Sheffield Hallam.

“Anyone is welcome to come and try,” Clegg told LBC Radio in response. “Boris Johnson is welcome to come and try and we’ll give him a good Sheffield thumping and send him straight back to London.” Clegg increased his share of the vote to 53.4 percent in 2010.